What methods do you use to continue challenging yourself and developing your skills as a writer?
If you need some ideas to enhance your writing abilities, in this article, we look at 5 ways you can grow as a writer.
1. Read a variety of written work
It is a given that all writers are avid readers. However, each writer – like each person – has their own taste in reading, and that taste can range to the genre they are writing in, along with a few other genres that they enjoy reading.
However, reading a variety of written work, not just for enjoyment, but for the purposes of analyzing said work as well is a key action you should do to grow as a writer. Read fiction in various genres different than yours, from novels, to short stories, to novellas, to flash fiction snippets of less than 10 words. Read nonfiction memoirs and autobiographies, read newspaper journals, even read what people are writing online.
Read a variety of work – and then form an opinion on what was done well in it and what was not done well. Then you can use what you have learned in your own future work.
2. Read book reviews
We all have our favorite books, books we loved, books we enjoyed reading but did not adore, books we absolutely hated. Read the reviews of those books – both the positive and the negative reviews. Take in the general opinion of the readers on the book (i.e. the overall rating). If a book was rated low, try to discover what people liked about it and what they disliked. Do the same for the books with higher ratings.
Also, check out the award-winning novels – read them, and then read both professional reviews written about those novels, as well as reviews from the general public. You can find readers’ reviews on seller websites like Amazon and Goodreads. Recently, social media has had a review boom with people making reels and videos about books and posting them on TikTok and YouTube respectively.
Become part of those communities, especially those that are dedicated to the genre your own body of work belongs to. Of course, if you write in a few different genres, then find your way online to all of those genre-related communities. It will help you understand what people like in popular stories, and then determine whether that is something you want to do.
For example, the new subgenre of Romantasy is gaining traction – it is the amalgamation of romance and fantasy. It’s the classic romance story set in a fantasy world, borrowing elements from epic fantasy and dark fantasy for the worldbuilding, and contemporary romance for the romantic plot. In such novels, a certain number of erotic scenes are expected, with varying degrees of graphic details.
But maybe you are a Romantasy author who doesn’t like to write explicit erotic scenes in the novel. Maybe you have published a Romantasy novel that has not done well. The lack of such scenes could be one of the reasons why – because the novel did not meet the established expectations of the genre. In such a case, you would have a choice to make – you can switch genres, go for epic fantasy with romantic elements, or you can try to write a more explicit romance.
3. Abandon your writer ego
This step is necessary if you want to grow as a writer because one of the ways of doing so is reading reviews of your own work, both positive reviews and negative reviews. In order to be able to gain as much as you can out of reading these (instead of getting depressed and demotivated as a writer), you need to abandon your writer ego.
In other words, you need to constantly remind yourself that you can always grow better as a writer. So when you read a positive review, know that yes, you’ve done well, but you can do even better. And when you read a negative review, know that there is nothing stopping you from doing better in the future.
Reading positive reviews can give you a good, positive feeling – but also inflate your ego and convince you that there is no need for you to work to get better. Reading negative reviews can make you feel depressed and it will make it difficult to keep writing stories. Reading them with an abandoned writer ego will help you understand what you’ve done well and what you need to work on better.
4. Analyze your own work
After going through the reviews of your novels (or stories), it is time to sit down with your work and analyze it. However, here, the goal is not to analyze whether you’ve told a good story or if your prose can be improved (although, prose can always be made better).
The goal here is to analyze what kind of characters do you write about most often. What are your protagonists like? What are the similarities between the protagonists? What are the differences between them? What are the other characters like, both major and minor? How often do you include kids and animals in your stories?
Furthermore, do you notice any repetitions in your characters? For example, let’s say that you’ve written 10 stories in total (regardless of how many of those are novels, novellas, or short stories). And in five out of those 10 stories, you have a young child character, no younger than 6 and no older than 10 in all iterations. Is the kid different in each story? Or is the kid precocious and sharing their child wisdom with the protagonist in each story?
Patterns like this can and will arise the more stories you write. Oftentimes, writers tend to go for what is familiar. It happens on a subconscious level. A redheaded character is spirited, fiery, and talks back to everyone. A librarian character is a lady, with brown hair, brown eyes, and glasses. She is probably wearing a cardigan over a shirt, and she knows each corner of the library and can help the protagonist in less than minute, even though the protagonist needs to find a very obscure tome.
Knowing which of these you tend to go for as a writer will help you catch yourself when you do it in your next story, and then you can spin it and make something different. For example, make the librarian a blonde, or give the fiery, spirited personality to a blonde.
5. Challenge yourself in small ways
Writers often have writing goals several years ahead, especially writers who tend to write book series. They might be working on two or three different book series in a given year (especially self-published writers because they need to put out more books per year to increase sales and be able to make a living).
As such, you might not have the time to just practice at the art of writing. But, that doesn’t mean that each word you write must be for publication reasons. You can still create small challenges for yourself that would not take too much of your time.
Some of these challenges can be:
- Writing flash fiction – telling a whole story in as few words as possible.
- Writing in a genre you’re not familiar with at all – just a scene or an interaction between two characters.
- If you tend to write from women’s point of view – write from a male’s point of view.
- Writing from a child’s point of view.
- Writing from a cat’s point of view (or another animal).
- Writing purple prose (prose that is lyrical, metaphorical, and in the most extreme cases, nonsensical too).
- Writing humorous skits.
- Writing in dry prose (without any use of metaphors or similes).
Challenging yourself in this way will help you hone your storytelling skills and your prose. And no matter what, at the end of the day, just keep writing and you will grow as a writer.